Banks and other financial institutions all over the world are under constant pressure from regulators such as Dodd-Frank-enforcers, the CFTC and SEC (News - Alert), and the UK's FCA, to improve the effectiveness of their financial compliance. Unavailability of voice based search is often quoted as a stumbling block for achieving a higher level of compliance.

To help financial institutions overcome this challenge, Cognia, a cloud based recording company, has launched Cognia Analytics - a secure, global cloud service which will allow banks to search the content of their voice communications, without the cost and complexity of on-site systems.

Curtis Nash, Cognia's CEO, says "For too long, financial compliance activities have been hampered by a lack of voice search capability. In the age of data, when email and other written communications can be searched at the click of a button, affordable speech analytics has remained tantalizingly out of reach."

Most of the hardware-based voice analytics solutions are often suffer from price and complexity related challenges. Firms having multiple voice recorders in different locations of different age and brand suffer even more with this problem. Cognia's cloud-based analytics service is claimed to remove these obstacles.

Using Cognia's mobile and landline recording services businesses can easily search the content of recorded calls and create comprehensive search packs, to target non-compliant behaviors such as insider trading. It can also automatically analyze all calls, as they are made.

Cognia Analytics can be rolled out easily across any location worldwide, without the need for on-site hardware. It allows compliance managers to get global oversight of all mobile, landline voice and data communications, without compromising the operational autonomy or flexibility of local teams.

Analytics specialist Ember Services welcomed the launch. Ember Service's Head of Analytics David Naylor said in a statement "The cloud is revolutionizing speech analytics. The wider take up of analytics has been held back by the traditional licensing model, with annual maintenance deals and upgrade charges that offer a high cost of ownership. Cognia's analytics service helps companies extract previously untapped intelligence from their voice data."